24. For the first characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race is that it is a race of talkers; and the destinies of the two most advanced nations of that race are to-day governed almost wholly by men whose strength is neither in the head nor in the will nor in the heart, but in the tongue. But the talker cares only for the effect of the moment. With the great hereafter he has but little to do; hence he becomes, first of all, a resounder, a thunderer, a sky-rockety dazzler. And once that, the orator need not even care whether he persuade or not; if he merely astound the ear, dazzle the eye, and overwhelm the hearer himself for the moment,--if, in short, he but produce _an_ effect, even if it be not _the_ effect desired,--it is well with him in his own estimation. The orator thus soon becomes the mere rhetorician. And this rhetorical quality, appealing as it does only to the superficial in man, and coming as it does only from the surface of the man, is found nowhere in such excess as in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon race. Ornament, metaphor, must be had, and if it cannot be had spontaneously from a fervid imagination, which alone is the legitimate producer of metaphor, recourse must be had to manufactured sound. Hence there is scarcely a single poet in the English tongue whose style is not vitiated by false metaphor; this is true of the greatest as well as of the least. The member of Parliament who smelt a rat, and saw it brewing in the air until it was in danger of becoming an apple of discord to the honorable members of the House, could have been born only on British soil. To take up arms against a sea of trouble, and to discover footprints in the sands of time while sailing over life's solemn main (no less than five false metaphors in this example from the Psalm of Life!) are feats that can be accomplished by the imagination of even a Shakespeare or a Longfellow solely because these are Anglo-Saxons. And I am yet to see five consecutive pages of any Anglo-Saxon poet free from this literary vice of false metaphor! I call this a vice because it is at bottom an insincerity of imagination. The false metaphors are not pictures seen, but pictures made up; they are not the spontaneous outbursts of an overflowing imagination, but the ground-out product of pictureless will for the sake of effect. And this I do not hesitate to call literary insincerity even though the process of making them up be unconscious at the time to the poet himself.